September/October 2013
Specialized attachments and systems can help automobile recyclers recover more scrap—and more value—from end-of-life vehicles if they have the volume to justify the purchase.
By Ken McEntee
The traditional automotive dismantling business is transforming rapidly. Small mom-and-pop salvage yards that dismantle each car manually face stiff competition from large, multiple-facility corporations that use sophisticated technology to diversify and expand beyond selling automotive parts. Although auto dismantlers still base their businesses on selling car parts, they are more conscious than ever about maximizing the scrap value of end-of-life vehicles. To recover more scrap—especially nonferrous scrap—from vehicles before selling them to shredders, recyclers now can buy attachments and systems specifically designed for vehicle dismantling. The manufacturers point out, however, that this equipment is most likely to prove cost-effective in yards with higher vehicle turnover rates.
Dismantling’s New Direction
Mike Albert, warehouse manager for Denison Auto Parts, a family-owned auto dismantler in Cleveland, says the majority of U.S. salvage operations are still small, family-owned, full-service parts retailers that dismantle vehicles the old-fashioned way—by hand. After buying a totaled vehicle, usually at salvage auctions, Denison—like many other small dismantlers—hauls it to a bay in its yard, where employees use basic tools such as wrenches, acetylene torches, reciprocating saws, and hoists to remove reusable parts it sells to individual customers, auto repair shops, or engine rebuilders. Items with lower demand, such as taillight covers and steering wheels, are left on the vehicle. Later, a “yard guy” has “a van loaded with torches and other tools that he uses to take off the parts in the yard if and when an order comes in for them,” Albert says. The largest piece of processing equipment in Denison’s yard is an old, unused car crusher parked in a corner of the property. “At an operation of our size, the crusher is more or less a thing of the past,” Albert says. “We just have to flatten the cars enough to be able to get nine bodies onto the truck.” The company uses a front-end loader to compress the vehicles and stack them on a truck for delivery to its scrap customer.
Although traditional, smaller, family-owned dismantling businesses such as Denison Auto Parts are still the most prevalent today, their numbers are steadily declining, says Michael Wilson, CEO of the Automotive Recyclers Association (Manassas, Va.). “In 1997, 90 percent of ARA members had 10 employees or fewer; today only 60 percent fall into that category,” he says. With vehicles becoming more technologically complex and larger corporate dismantlers vying for market share, it’s more difficult for small operators to survive, which has led to significant consolidation in the industry. The entry of large corporations into the dismantling business has led automotive recyclers to compete at a much higher level, Wilson says.
In addition to full-service auto recycling facilities, the industry has self-service facilities in which customers enter the recycling yard to remove the parts they need directly from the vehicles in inventory. About a quarter of U.S. auto salvage yards use this model, Wilson says. Self-service auto recyclers typically stock large quantities of retired vehicles on their lots, organizing them by car manufacturer to help customers easily find the make, model, and year they need. To succeed, these yards rely on fast turnaround of a high-volume inventory, says Adam Lindley, sales manager for SAS Forks (Luxemburg, Wis.). “They can’t have a car on the lot that is 50-percent picked over,” he points out. “A customer who shows up on the lot and needs a certain door that was already taken off the car might not come back the next time he needs something. On the other hand, if a car sits for 45 days and nobody takes any parts off it, it’s not making the company any money.” So these facilities turn over inventory frequently, cycling cars through the yard every 30 to 60 days.
After pulling a vehicle out of inventory, a high-volume yard’s goal is to recover as much salable scrap from it as efficiently as possible. “They want to get every ounce of scrap material they can get before the car goes to the shredder,” Lindley says. “You’re going to get more for those components [when you sell them separately for their scrap value] than you would by leaving them in the car and getting a car-body price for the vehicle.” This goal is what’s likely driving interest in dismantling attachments and systems. As Lindley puts it, “If I’m getting 30 cents a pound from a scrapyard for a car body, but I can get 75 cents a pound for aluminum, it becomes much more financially appealing to purchase a machine that can rip the aluminum motor and transmission out instead of sending them to the shredder with the rest of the car.”
Dismantling Options
SAS Forks offered engine-pulling attachments in the 1980s, Lindley says, “but after a while [demand] just fell by the wayside for a good 10 to 15 years. … When we started to bring these machines back in the mid-2000s, a lot of auto recyclers didn’t believe they were necessary, but there has been a phenomenal change in opinion over the last five or six years.” The dismantling attachments on the market connect to either a wheel loader or an excavator, both pieces of equipment a dismantling yard is likely to own. The attachment “makes your wheel loader multipurpose,” Lindley says. “You already have the loader to move cars, load your crusher, and load and unload your hulks, so you don’t have to purchase another piece of equipment. Plus, attaching the engine puller doesn’t require any modifications to the machine itself.” He recommends such tools to yards that dismantle at least 20 to 40 cars a week.
SAS Forks offers the Claw and Scorpion engine pullers and the Extreme auto processing unit. The Claw is the company’s low-end engine puller attachment, designed for mounting on a wheel loader weighing 10 to 24 tons. The $22,500 unit, which suits yards handling a low volume of vehicles, has forklift-type forks and an attached jaw that can pull the engine from a vehicle. The Claw doesn’t secure the car with hold-down arms, however, so the process tends to be less controlled and can take longer than if the car were held down, Lindley says. The company’s Scorpion engine puller attachment, released in 2007, comes in two sizes: The 20 series is for wheel loaders weighing 10.5 to 14.5 tons; the 30 series mounts on loaders from 14.5 to 24 tons. “The Scorpion will attach to any loader in those ranges that has an auxiliary hydraulic function on it,” Lindley says. The $40,000 to $45,000 attachment holds the car down with an “extremely strong” set of forks, and its pincer jaws—which are more mobile than those in the Claw—offer “very accurate” control “so the operator can get the unit into the car and pull anything, including the engine, heater core, and transmission.” The Scorpion requires one hydraulic auxiliary function to operate, and it can be designed to attach with either a pin mount or a quick-coupler.
The Extreme auto processor, which SAS introduced in 2011, is a larger, excavator-mounted unit that features “stabilization restraint arms” to hold down scrap vehicles and a jaw attachment on the excavator’s stick that can rotate 360 degrees. The two serrated jaws operate like needle-nose pliers to remove any part in the vehicle, Lindley says. The unit, which costs about $55,000, requires two auxiliary hydraulic lines on the stick for the jaw attachment and rotator function and one hydraulic line in the undercarriage for the hold-down arms. It’s designed for base machines weighing 16 to 20 tons.
Pemberton (Longwood, Fla.) offers a wheel-loader-mounted engine puller attachment that has a set of forks for positioning and securing a scrap vehicle and a three-jointed claw that hydraulically maneuvers from above to scoop out the engine and other components. The attachment, which has heavy-duty hydraulic cylinders and hardened steel pins and bushings, attaches with pin-on mounts or various quick-couplers.
It requires up to two extra hydraulic lines to operate, depending on the base machine’s style. For operations using excavators, Pemberton offers an engine puller with a rotating head that requires two extra hydraulic lines. The company also manufactures the Power Picker, a simple excavator-mounted tool that requires no extra hydraulic lines because it uses the machine’s dig cylinder. In addition to removing engines and other automotive components, the Power Picker can process other scrap items such as white goods. In the Builtrite Auto Dismantling System from Northshore Manufacturing (Two Harbors, Minn.), the jaw attachment and hold-down arms mount to an excavator that weighs 18 to 25 tons, with the most common base machines weighing 20 to 22 tons, says Uwe Kausch, marketing and international sales manager. The system has “two arms that lift up, go over the car, squish the car to the ground, and enable the operator to [use the jaw attachment to] go into the engine compartment and pull the engine, transmission, radiator, heater core, AC units, computer, and wiring harnesses.” The jaw set, which can rotate 360 degrees, has heavy-duty, high-pressure cylinders and replaceable tips. The Builtrite system is suited to “a higher-volume, self-service yard that can process 50 to 60 cars a day or more,” Kausch says. “This machine will process a car every six to 10 minutes, depending on the car type and what you want to get out of it.” The company says it can install the unit on virtually any standard tracked excavator as well as a wheeled excavator if equipped with a blade. In terms of hydraulics, the grapple requires two circuits to operate, while the hold-down arms use the travel circuit function or the blade function.
Northshore developed the Builtrite system in response to a request from an Indianapolis auto dismantler. The recycler “asked if we could attach one of our grapples and a hold-down device to his excavator,” Kausch says. Earlier versions of engine pullers it developed mounted on a front-end loader, which worked well for removing engines but limited the recovery of other materials, he says. “As copper prices rose, some of the real value recyclers were missing was in the wiring harnesses,” he explains. “Putting an attachment on an excavator gives you a lot more dexterity because you have the added articulation that can move in and focus on specific components. It’s very intricate; you can pull anything you want out of a car.”
The only stationary system that integrates dismantling and baling operations is the ELV Vehicle Recycling System from Al-jon Manufacturing (Ottumwa, Iowa). The system consists of a hold-down table for immobilizing the car during processing, a pedestal- or frame-mounted material handler for pulling cores and miscellaneous parts, and a baler/logger or Al-jon’s Impact V car crusher to compact the hulk for easier handling and transportation. “Most of the machines we sell are electric, which are cleaner and safer to run, but they’re also available with diesel power,” says John Portwood, vice president of sales and marketing. Al-jon designed the system for high-volume processors—those handling 10 to 20 vehicles an hour—who want to maximize recovery of ferrous and nonferrous metals, says Curt Spry, sales manager. “Owners of our ELV system have indicated they are obtaining an additional $100 per car in core and nonferrous material,” he says. “The equipment makes it very easy to recover this material rather than pulling it by hand.” The ELV system, which costs about $750,000, “is about maximizing productivity and using the least amount of manpower,” Portwood says. “It does the work a staff of people would normally do. Instead of six people dismantling a car, this system requires only [one worker] feeding it with a forklift and a second worker running the crane.”
Vendors say no special skills are required to run these vehicle dismantling tools, and operators can be proficient in a week or two. “What a lot of companies are doing is making machine operators out of their yard workers who have been in the business a while and who know where the components are located on each vehicle, whether it’s an Impala or a Mercedes 350,” Kausch says. “They have to learn the controls, but [these machines] are all joystick-controlled, and these young guys have been playing video games for years or operating other equipment, so it isn’t hard [for them] to learn.”
To decide whether investing in such equipment is cost-effective, a dismantling facility should look at how many vehicles it processes, these vendors say. “It all depends on volume,” Lindley says. “I have customers who do 1,200 to 1,500 cars a month, and their return on investment is 30 days. Your location also matters. If you’re on the coasts, you’re going to have a faster payback because of access to the export market.” Smaller operations won’t see as quick a return on investment, he concedes. “Typical mom-and-pop recyclers might have 200 to 400 cars in the yard, and they’re more likely to remove the engine by hand to resell,” he says. Such operations might buy five to 10 cars a week and leave vehicles in the yard for a year before cycling them out. “This equipment probably isn’t something they need,” he says.
Changing the Game
Specialized vehicle dismantling equipment is helping dismantlers “realize there are more valuable parts on the vehicle than just what can be sold to the customer over the counter,” Lindley says. “It has made operators look at streamlining their operations to get every penny out of their vehicles.”
The machines are moving the recovery of scrap materials backward in the chain from shredding operations to dismantling yards. “Most shredders don’t like these tools because they allow the dismantlers to recover the most valuable scrap in the vehicles,” Kausch says. “The shredders spend a lot of money on downstream equipment to recover the copper and various other materials after the car is shredded. This equipment pulls the good stuff out before the car even gets to their yard.” Scrapyards with shredders that haven’t yet invested in downstream equipment or that have older equipment might consider investing in dismantling attachments to avoid the higher cost of installing a downstream separation system, he adds.
That ability to “pull the good stuff out” and growing demand for scrap have generated significant interest in these tools, manufacturers say. “This has been a bright spot in an economy in which the scrap industry isn’t buying a lot of equipment,” Kausch says. “Several customers are buying their second, third, or fourth units.” That news might not make shredder operators happy, but it certainly gives automotive recyclers—and their respective bottom lines—a brighter outlook going forward.
Ken McEntee is editor and publisher of The Paper Stock Report and Paper Recycling Online (www.recycle.cc).